Fus Vee Ah! Skyrim VR jacking into PC next month

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Given that the iconic image of Skyrim is a fella wearing a Knightmare-esque bucket on his head, it’s only fitting that Bethesda want you to strap cybergoggles onto your head to enter the fantasy RPG’s world. Today they announced a PC release for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR, a new standalone version built for cybergoggles. Skyrim VR debuted on PlayStation VR in November 2017, and now it’s headed to PC on April 3rd. It seems a terrible shame that the game doesn’t (as far as I know) use goggle microphones to control dragon shouts.

Skyrim VR is Skyrim, yeah, but in VR. It comes with the Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn DLCs built in. And yes, like Fallout 4 VR it is a wholly separate paid game, not offered as an upgrade and seemingly not offering a discount to existing Skyrim owners.

Bethesda say Skyrim VR uses SteamVR so, despite the recent courthouse rumble between their parent company and Oculus, it will work with HTC Vive and Oculus Rift goggles as well as compatible others. And it’ll support both motion controllers and gamepads.

Doing wizardhands and swinging axes makes Skyrim seem a better fit for VR than Fallout 4, though unless Bethesda have made some changes I suspect some of the problems our Alec had with that might apply here. As he wrote:

“This being Fallout 4 rather than a new Fallout made from the ground up in VR, a lot of the interactions are essentially menu-based rather than physical. You don’t reach out to slap a door open button, for instance, but raise your wand and click a text option to do it. In other words, you’re regularly checking your own actions, going against the psychical intuition that a VR world encourages. All told, I never felt at home with the controls, and wished I could just play it on a gamepad instead – or could just sit with a mouse and keyboard, in front of a nice, crisp monitor.”

These Bethesda VR remakes interest me, in the sense that they seem somewhat counter-intuitive. Sure, TES and (Bethesda’s) FO games seem to be hallmarks of “immersion” to a large group of gamers, but Bethesda also delivers some of the very worst interface design in a industry full of absolutely terrible interface design. More than anything, VR is an interface problem, not a graphics problem, and Bethesda seems almost uniquely positioned to fail. Yet people will buy this by the boatload, and the end result will continue to shape and constrain the possibilities of VR on the mass market.

I failed twice to get into Skyrim due the the UI and controls. I much preferred Morrowind, with the way you could drag items onto your character and rearrange the backpack. So this VR version – if it makes the UI better, I might finally get to play the game. If worse, what a wasted opportunity.

I suppose it’s a bit late for all of this, but the modding community solved the junk UI years ago, basically rebuilding the UI entirely and making room for mods to play with the UI as well.

SkyUI is the mod you are looking for. I don’t think it’s officially out for the Skyrim Special Edition (I think it’s in alpha still, as of this comment at least), but it’s been a mainstay in the original game for years. I would imagine the vast, vast majority of people still playing Skyrim post 2015 have been using SkyUI.

Chiming in to say that while SkyUI (and to the same extent, Skyrim Script Extender, the biggest “mod-enabling mod”, that allows things like SkyUI to exist) is in alpha, it works like a charm. I’ve picked up Skyrim again a few weeks ago, went for the special edition, and it’s been running flawlessly so far (90 mods, around 40 hours of gametime).

No, I looked at that – it still turned the inventory into a huge spreadsheet/table and looked awful. I was told there were no mods at all that did it in the style of Morrowind/Dungeon Master/Might & Magic/Grimrock etc, where you have a grid you can drag items around, and drag them onto your character to equip them.

Skyrim VR uses SteamVR so, despite the recent courthouse rumble between Bethesda’s parent company and Oculus, it will work with HTC Vive and Oculus Rift goggles as well as compatible others. And it’ll support both motion controllers and gamepads.

If this turns out to be true, I’ll probably be on board for the VR release. True, this would be the third version I bought and fourth version I played, but Skyrim is a much more pleasant environment to hang around than the post-apocalyptic Fallout universe, and Fallout 4 VR is unfortunately too difficult and kludgy to get to work with my Oculus.

Who is ‘they’ here? Bethesda? Zenimax? Trump supporters based on what? Is the entire corporation Trump supporters, or just two or three people? “Gun violence scapegoat enablers” barely even makes sense. What, because someone from the company attended that stupid meeting on videogame violence? Is that also where you’re getting ‘Trump supporters’ from?

You end up coming across as a rambling lunatic when you just spout a bunch of apparently baseless accusations like this. Put some effort in.

“Today we are excited to introduce a new feature in SteamVR Beta that allows customers to get the best visual experience out of their GPU, lowers the cost of VR, and makes developer’s lives a little bit easier. We’re doing this by custom-tuning application resolution so that it is optimal for each customer’s GPU and VR headset.” link to steamcommunity.com

Also owning a 970GTX, the older Steam Vr test suite stated my system was “Good”, so it should be ok.

However as always with the industry, if you give them access to better hardware, the products bloat to fill all that extra power. So it won’t be “Good” forever.

Which is why we still need Demos today. Or at least seperate benchmarking tools. If they want VR to take off, there needs to be more ways for people to test at home if the rest of their kit measures up first, so they know what other outlay they may still need…

I wouldn’t mind paying a decent good chunk of change for what amounts to a large engine/gameplay/animation update (and for the VR goodness, of course), but ~68 USD in my region for something I already own [a license to use] more than half of?* I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled for a sale since even Fallout 4 VR retains that price.

Zenimax and others are trying to slowly turn us all into one those “5 dollars is way too much for this fabulous and humongous game” people, I bet. Then they’ll have a bigger excuse to turn all their output into f2p loot box parties with ads served directly to your tracked and retina-scanned eyeballs, yay!

Anyway, thanks for saving me the hard drive space for a few more years…

*Assuming the visual and audible art and world and voice acting and remaining engine code and all took more resources than the [not insignificant amount of] new stuff, here.

Wait, blargh, I suppose one could legitimately argue the potential player base is tiny, justifying the larger per-customer price for what likely took far fewer resources to create than their original work did. Still doesn’t make it an attractive price, though. I’ll probably still wait for others to do Bethesda’s/Zenimax’s testing for them, and I’ll continue playing with the wonderful (if slightly janky) free VR support in games like Elite: Dangerous and Subnautica, but I hereby half-heartedly withdraw a non-whole portion of my morning grumps above.

If you own Minecraft (who doesn’t). Then there are both a Windows 10 version and Java version (Vivecraft) both very different from each other. Vivecraft was my fist taste of a humongous open world game in VR.

Vivecraft has most features tailored to VR and does support Rift and Microsoft VR but it’s not as stable and good looking as the windows 10 version on MS store or Oculus store.

I’m willing to pay full price for Skyrim VR even though I already have the game… but only if it has “full price” VR integration. If they just slapped this shit together and it barely works, I’ll pass. A VR walking simulator over $5 doesn’t interest me. A good Skyrim experience in VR though… that I’ll pay for.

I’ll wait and see, but after the reviews of Fallout VR, my hopes are pretty low. I’d love to wrong, because a good Skyrim VR experience would be a dream.